Legal malpractice claimed dismissed as time-barred.

A legal malpractice claim filed eighteen months after the Court of Appeals affirmed the underlying conviction was time-barred.

In Lee v. Richardson, No. M2024-01130-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. Feb. 21, 2025), the Court of Appeals affirmed dismissal of a pro se legal malpractice complaint based on the statute of limitations. The plaintiff sued several defendant attorneys, all of whom had represented him during various stages of an underlying criminal case. The plaintiff asserted that the defendants failed to properly investigate or assert arguments that the criminal court did not have territorial jurisdiction of the kidnapping charge.

The trial court noted that the plaintiff had made this territorial jurisdiction argument at all levels of his criminal case, including the Court of Criminal Appeals, which rejected the argument and affirmed the plaintiff’s conviction. The Court also pointed out that the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the plaintiff’s conviction on November 10, 2022, and issued the mandate back to the trial court on January 26, 2023. The trial court accordingly found that the legal malpractice complaint filed in June 2024 was time-barred, and the Court of Appeals affirmed.

A legal malpractice claim is subject to a one-year statute of limitations. Pursuant to the discovery rule, the statute of limitations begins to run when two elements are met: “(1) an actual injury because of the defendant’s negligence; and (2) the plaintiff must have known, or should have known, that this injury was caused by the defendant’s negligent conduct.” (internal citation omitted).

Here, the plaintiff should have known that the territorial jurisdiction argument failed when the trial court rejected it in 2020, and again when the Court of Appeals affirmed his conviction in November 2022. Even looking to the latest date in the underlying case, which was when the Court of Appeals issued the mandate back to the trial court in January 2023, the very latest the plaintiff could have possibly filed his legal malpractice claim was January 2024. Instead, the plaintiff waited until June 2024 to file, and dismissal pursuant to the statute of limitations was therefore affirmed.

This opinion was released two weeks after the case was assigned on briefs.